I reached out to our friends in atarionline.pl for their aDawliah cartridges and they have been extremely helpful. During SillyVenture 2k17, two wonderful people (Nosty and Voy) promised to help me obtain the dumps of the aDawliah cartridges NA0021, 0031, and 0033 referenced earlier in this thread.

Well, in due time, they have shared the images which they obtained using AtariMax USB cartridge programmer, but seemed to have gone through some problems with banking (expected). I also played with the possible combinations of banking profiles when running Altirra and was able to get one cartridge to map properly and eventually work (NA0021 dictionary). I placed the rom file there for those interested to download it.

If you have the experience and desire to help me rescue the Arabic content of Atari, please feel free to contribute to the thread over there.

Some help is needed here. This is an image of an aDawliah disk image that is working on my Atari 130XE and XF551 drive. I was able to rescue this from my Atari childhood days. As I had purchased Lotharek's SIO2SD, I created an ATR file of the disk image.

When I play this image on my Atari 130XE, it works fine. But, when I attempt to run it on Altirra, it fails.

You need to disable BASIC (by pressing Option on Atari 130XE), but disabling it on Altirra through the menu configuration fails (the image just causes the emulator to hang).

I reached out to our friends in atarionline.pl for their aDawliah cartridges and they have been extremely helpful. During SillyVenture 2k17, two wonderful people (Nosty and Voy) promised to help me obtain the dumps of the aDawliah cartridges NA0021, 0031, and 0033 referenced earlier in this thread.

Well, in due time, they have shared the images which they obtained using AtariMax USB cartridge programmer, but seemed to have gone through some problems with banking (expected). I also played with the possible combinations of banking profiles when running Altirra and was able to get one cartridge to map properly and eventually work (NA0021 dictionary). I placed the rom file there for those interested to download it.

If you have the experience and desire to help me rescue the Arabic content of Atari, please feel free to contribute to the thread over there.

Thanks!

Courtesy of Nosty, please find attached my attempt to map NA0021, the Arabic-English and English-Arabic dictionary of aDawliah. This is a snapshot and a ROM image. Please help us with the other two if you know how to.

I reached out to our friends in atarionline.pl for their aDawliah cartridges and they have been extremely helpful. During SillyVenture 2k17, two wonderful people (Nosty and Voy) promised to help me obtain the dumps of the aDawliah cartridges NA0021, 0031, and 0033 referenced earlier in this thread.

Well, in due time, they have shared the images which they obtained using AtariMax USB cartridge programmer, but seemed to have gone through some problems with banking (expected).

Already posted this at AtariOnline a few days ago: I've managed to reverse-engineer the mapping used by Nosty's aDawliah cartridges, and added support for them to Atari800. The description of the new mapping is at the end of DOC/cart.txt.

I'd like to ask our Arabic-speaking fellows to test whether these ROM images work correctly, and to provide information about them if available:a) the original titles of programs, as on the title screens, in Arabic (hopefully the forum supports displaying left-to-right Arabic text);b) English translations of titles,c) any information displayed on the title screens: dates of release, company name, programmer's names?

It'll be used to fill the gaps in Farb's software preservation database.

Already posted this at AtariOnline a few days ago: I've managed to reverse-engineer the mapping used by Nosty's aDawliah cartridges, and added support for them to Atari800. The description of the new mapping is at the end of DOC/cart.txt.

I'd like to ask our Arabic-speaking fellows to test whether these ROM images work correctly, and to provide information about them if available:
a) the original titles of programs, as on the title screens, in Arabic (hopefully the forum supports displaying left-to-right Arabic text);
b) English translations of titles,
c) any information displayed on the title screens: dates of release, company name, programmer's names?

It'll be used to fill the gaps in Farb's software preservation database.

Hello Kr0tki,

Thanks for sharing this with us. I am not very familiar with Atari800 as I am using Mac.

Upon trying to run these images on Altirra (using Mac with Wine), it objected against using image format 69. I tried to run Atari800 with Wine, but it is not allowing me to access the menu (only the Altirra Memopad).

I will continue to try out, and if I succeed, I can certainly answer a and b for you.

Already posted this at AtariOnline a few days ago: I've managed to reverse-engineer the mapping used by Nosty's aDawliah cartridges, and added support for them to Atari800. The description of the new mapping is at the end of DOC/cart.txt.

I'd like to ask our Arabic-speaking fellows to test whether these ROM images work correctly, and to provide information about them if available:
a) the original titles of programs, as on the title screens, in Arabic (hopefully the forum supports displaying left-to-right Arabic text);
b) English translations of titles,
c) any information displayed on the title screens: dates of release, company name, programmer's names?

It'll be used to fill the gaps in Farb's software preservation database.

Thanks for sharing this with us. I am not familiar with Atari800, so I started with Altirra and it objected against using image format 69 and thus did not work.

I was somehow able to access the Atari800 menu, and ran both cartridges NA0031 and NA0033. The images seem to work fine there. Trying to run these cartridges using Ultimate Cartridge on Atari 130XE or Atari 65XE نجم Najm both failed. I think this cartridge does not support format 69 either.

Now answering your questions a and b:

a) NA0031 is الطاقة transliterated as at-taaqah. This is Arabic for "Energy". NA0033 is كيف يعمل الكمبيوتر which is transliterated as kayfa ya'amalul computer. The word computer was moved to Arabic as is though the proper translation would be Hasubحاسوب. This is translated as "How Does the Computer Work?"

b) Please see (a).

c) Sorry no idea. I wish I had any information. These are definitely by aDawliah company based in Jeddah in KSA.

(...) started with Altirra and it objected against using image format 69 and thus did not work. (...) Trying to run these cartridges using Ultimate Cartridge on Atari 130XE or Atari 65XE نجم Najm both failed. I think this cartridge does not support format 69 either.

Of course they do not support mapping no. 69, it was reverse-engineered just a week ago.

Thank you for the title translations. What about the cartridge NA021 "Najm Dictionary"?

Is there a way to remap these cartridges to mapper 56?

It's not possible to simply remap them to any other mapping. The aDawliah cartridges are different than all other mappings in that they do not allow to select banks randomly, but only to cycle through them in order.

However, all three cartridges just copy the cartridge contents to RAM at initialization, and don't appear to do any bank-switching afterwards, so it would be rather easy to hack the initialization routines to support another cartridge mapping.

Of course they do not support mapping no. 69, it was reverse-engineered just a week ago.

Thank you for the title translations. What about the cartridge NA021 "Najm Dictionary"?

It's not possible to simply remap them to any other mapping. The aDawliah cartridges are different than all other mappings in that they do not allow to select banks randomly, but only to cycle through them in order.

However, all three cartridges just copy the cartridge contents to RAM at initialization, and don't appear to do any bank-switching afterwards, so it would be rather easy to hack the initialization routines to support another cartridge mapping.

Thanks Kr0tki. I am not really into the architecture of the Atari computer. Thanks for sharing about the mapping.

As for NA0021, I skipped it thinking it was straightforward in the snapshot posted earlier, but based on request here you go:

This dictionary is قاموس نجم which is transliterated as qamusu najm. That is English for Najm Dictionary (surprise!).

Thanks to you Kr0tki, and my thanks extend to Kaz, Voy, and Nosty from your great forum. This would have not been possible if it was not for your support and desire to help. It feels particularly great to see that the Arabic language had presence in the 8-bit world as our friend Madi pointed out when he started this thread.

All cassettes have data on only one side of the cassette, the cassette inlays are professionally made and contain loading instructions in English and Arabic. I guess someone in the UK used these cassettes to re-record software on these cassettes, but I am not sure.

I have seen some of these tapes before in Ebay, so I am hoping that someone else can confirm what should be on these cassette tapes.

I have included 3 working CAS-files of these tapes, on Atari Sector you can find a 4th file . As you can see there is no arabic text on screen